Early in the new “Orange Is the New Black” season, Dale Soules’ character, Frieda, casually disposes of a dead guard by hacking up his body. “I’m regularly shocked by what my character does,” Soules says, dryly. And while acting can get “hot, sweaty and scary,” she insists that “theater saved my life!” She grew up poor, spending part of her childhood with her grandmother in Greenwood Lake, NJ, in a home without running water. She worked in summer stock in high school and joined the original cast of Broadway’s “Hair” after 23 auditions: “They told me the company astrologer said my chart didn’t line up with the others,” she says. Catch her and other “Hair” veterans July 24 at 54 Below, where they’ll sing that show’s great hits.

Here’s what’s in her library:

Tell Me a Riddle by Tillie Olsen

I loved this book of short stories as soon as I read it, in the ’70s. The very first story, “I Stand Here Ironing,” is about a daughter, who’s having trouble in school, and her mother, who’s had a difficult life, and I was struck by parallels with my own mother and me. I’d never read anything else, outside of Dickens, that spoke so much about the working class and the struggle of women.

The Shape of a Pocket by John Berger

Berger’s best-known book is “Ways of Seeing.” In this book of essays, he shows how commodities have replaced the future as a vehicle of hope — purchasing something isn’t going to make you happy. If you don’t talk about what’s hurting, what’s wrong, you can’t hope to fix it.

A Rap on Race by Margaret Mead & James Baldwin

This is a transcript of their dialogue, and it’s fantastic. In fact, this may be a template for talking about race: They were both so bright — she was the most famous cultural anthropologist, and he was a wonderful writer and civil rights activist and a homosexual. I relate to outsiders, whether it involves race, class or sexuality.

His Eye Is On the Sparrow by Ethel Waters, Charles Samuels

This is an autobiography about the great actress, the product of a rape, who starred on Broadway in “The Member of the Wedding.” Waters lived in New Jersey then, and my grandmother occasionally worked as her maid. She told me, “[Waters] introduces me by my full name, as though I was as good as anyone at the table.”